


portmanteau

by adoxographs



Category: Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Hoshido | Birthright Route, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-14
Updated: 2017-09-18
Packaged: 2018-08-22 11:00:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8283502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adoxographs/pseuds/adoxographs
Summary: everything about him makes you ache.





	1. dragon blood

your skin turns hoshidan gold within the first few months of abandoning your heritage so you can swap it out for a new – and old – one. it is just another step down the road of betrayal you have been following ever since your mouth spoke out of turn in the middle of a battlefield. you do not look behind you to see the path you have walked down because you are afraid your footsteps have already faded too much for you to ever retrace them. worst of all, the slight possibility that you could still follow them home – to _that_ home, not this one – keeps you sane. it shouldn't do.

what is even worse to fantasise about is perhaps still being able to meld some sort of peace between the family you are forced to betray and the one you choose to, though which way round they are you become less and less sure with each passing day. you move forward without ever looking behind you and force yourself never to think about what you are leaving behind, only what you are striving for.

falling apart at the seams has been something you've done all your life so far. mostly you think being locked up in a tower for almost all of your living memory made you like this, but other times you wonder if it's just in your blood. (your dragon blood.) it is a wonder jakob puts up with you. sometimes you get so annoyed by his resilience of devotion you think it is a wonder _you_ put up with _him_ , but this is cruel and wrong and you know it. you feel guilty for how quickly he starts to learn to stay out of your way out of love for you, to have your swords sharpened and a cup of tea ready for when you arrive but to be far away enough to give you space when you are exhausted, which is quickly becoming all of the time.

you hate your tree-house. lilith made it in the image of the childish kamui who was naïve and excited to leave her fortress, sleeping beauty on day release, who later turned out to be spoilt enough to run away and make a life of it. you do not hate lilith, but you are not that kamui now. you are still naïve, but war harrows a girl very quickly. (it harrows boys quickly too – you see that when you look around at the dinner table, when you glance at silas and the crease between his eyebrows.)

war has made you world-weary, though you are still excited by the prospect of everything else, viewing everything but conflict with such fresh eyes – eyes that have seen more people be cut down for living on the wrong side of a border than anything else. you wish you had seen hundreds of flowers or waterfalls or something beautiful but instead the thing that repeats itself incessantly throughout your life with a weakened, cracking voice, is slaughter. it is a slaughter that not all of you can side with.

war has taught you that everybody around you is selfless, and you are endlessly selfish.

your room is furnished with selflessness. orochi writes you happy fortunes that you have a hard time believing in and you keep them littered all over your desk; she lends you makeup to daub under your eyes to hide the dark rings a little, too. a row of hayato's charms strung up above your window make a soft jingling sound whenever the breeze picks up. on your shelf you have books from azama on meditation, next to a hoshidan dictionary from azura. small paintings you and kagero have worked on together are stuck to the wall, in a single line from floor to ceiling. you close your eyes before you can seek out the coin purse from hana or the clothes from oboro.

kaden sees through orochi's makeup and offers to nap with you. kaze saves you from bandits numerous times when you are too tired to notice. takumi is distant at first, and then he starts to teach you archery under the guise that it will improve his skills to teach someone else. hinoka takes you out on her pegasus to let you feel the wind in your hair. ryoma will have long conversations with you about anything, a good listener.

rinkah teaches you to speak like there's fire in your stomach, how to talk with gravity. your trembling tone needed it. now you sway a room's attention to you with a single word, if you need it. you like it that way.

setsuna finds traps for you both to fall into for a few hours, and you don't know if she does it when she can tell you need a break, but it feels like it, and even though it's obvious each time she starts to lead you away, sometimes you follow her anyway. you sit in the dirt and stare at your feet and try to sort out your head, try to take it apart piece by piece to polish it all, patching up the holes and the cracks, like how you treat your armour. setsuna is happy to just stare up at the clouds.

sakura never asks you what's wrong or if you need help, but she starts brewing sleeping tonics for you. while it surprised you at the time, it makes sense that she would be acutely observant.

silas only ever asks once. from then on he never asks you about it again, because he is never going to force you to talk about it. he trusts you to reach out whenever you need him and proves his loyalty over and over when he comes to your room and sits with you for hours when you want company, even if you don't feel like talking. his skin has stayed nohrian porcelain and everything about him makes you _ache_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so so much for reading. i've never posted before and i feel a bit stupid but hopefully this wasn't entirely awful


	2. pyrrhic victories

you are sat leaning against the wall of the training hall, head between your knees, trying not to vomit. you wanted to see what would happen if you ignored your under-trained muscles and their cries for you to stop, take a break, have some rest. what would happen if you just _kept going_.

you can't look up without risking throwing up but you're pretty sure it's not light outside anymore.

you've never trained this hard for anything in your life and if you think about it you know you are training to kill the family you were raised with. bile rushes into your mouth at this.

you spend all your time remembering details about them but the information doesn't occur to you for an advantage in battle; you think of them because you love them. this is the worst part.

you'd never had chance to love anyone but them. your siblings, and jakob, felicia, lilith (and poor gunter. this makes you squeeze your eyes shut).

silas, too, who faded from your memory just as quickly as everyone else seemed to grow up (without you).

'til now you have been able to love everyone you met, everyone, pushing it into their hands like an excitable child, grinning from ear to ear at this new person, this fresh set of stories and new voice, this face not yet studied, these conversations not yet had and the time not yet spent together.

everyone but garon.

now you have an abundance of the stuff, unsure who to direct it at, and a massive ugly feeling of _guilt_.

you taste more bile and desperately try to steady your breathing. you know you are hoping someone will arrive to wrap their arm around you and tell you they were worried and help you back to your stupid tree-house, but this is stupid and naïve. you're in a _war_. of course people have other things to do.

so after a long pause of staring at one spot on the ground to try to steady yourself, you get to your feet and walk yourself back to bed. this is a bigger victory than all your training that day, though sometimes you think all your victories are pyrrhic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks a lot a lot for reading this chapter, sorry it's quite short


	3. idiot princess

silas has pulled you out to some far corner of the castle gardens by the wrist, his white skin against your gold, a quiet smile on his face. you can see the fatigue in the way he holds himself because it is how you hold yourself too. his shoulders, broad, hang inwards slightly, and you know there is an awful, purpling bruise just below his left-side shoulder-blade from the last battle. (it takes all your effort to avoid it when you spar. you think he knows you do that. he doesn't say anything.)

you've waited a long time to be able to be someplace flowers can grow, to have a boy touch your arm and it not be during combat practice, not something you must flinch away from. (you flinch anyway, but the warmth comes from knowing you didn't need to.)

aside from your siblings – your brain trips over this word and you tear on its reins with gritted teeth, stopping yourself from pursuing the thought any further - you doubt you remember the last time someone touched you. jakob maintains a professional distance, unless you are injured. felicia observes this too.

(gunter treated you like his daughter; when you were younger he would hug you and hold your hand, play games with you in quieter hours, but then you got older and catch turned to swordsmanship and everything stopped being fun.)

with silas, it happens casually.

you are leading a fight and you would never, _never_ abandon your friends and allies (your brain chimes in: never  _again_ , and you wish it wouldn't) – the thought makes you feel ill – but in lesser moments, you think about princesses and knights and how it would be to just to jump in the saddle, and he in his, and ride away. this is unbelievably stupid and irresponsible.

something about him suggests the thought to you anyway.

of course, the daydream never goes beyond tearing away from everything at speeds enough to make your blood teem. never moves further than watching a black mane flair in rhythm below your hands, as you urge it – _go faster. run further._ the daydream is about the act of running away more than where you would go, what you would do. girls aren't made to sit in rooms and watch time like it is a force they don't want to maul to their whim, to fight with, to tear at. to roar at. you sat and watched it once. you will never do it again.

and so you will not be the sort of princess who runs away from anything anymore, or needs someone to sweep her away from the pain and trauma of war to another tower somewhere. a life of problems being kept away from you means that you are obliged to grab at them with greedy hands, now, though they hurt.

silas looks so happy to be out here. your eyes don't leave him for too long even as he wanders in and out of sight through the bamboo. everything about him screams of nohr – the pale skin, the heavy accent (yours is fading). you both stumble over hoshidan words like they weren't meant for your tongues. you learnt some back in nohr, of course – enough for conversations shouted over battlefields, key words, the only words anyone ever wants to understand in a war of two or more sides (of which not all wars are). _right, wrong, battle, power, victory, death._

day-to-day-conversation, however, you try to make very different.

oftentimes, when alone, you and silas will speak a portmanteau of the two, hashing nohrian adjectives with hoshidan nouns, a verbal reflection of how your brain speaks, too. you almost like the jarring, irregular prosody of your eclectic (and admittedly painfully ugly) speech. it feels like an awkward adolescent version of a secret language you and silas might have constructed as children, if you had been allowed to be friends.

five minutes later – time like this is so scarce – he circles back through the plants to you and tucks a flower behind your ear, smiling with the corners of his mouth, and his eyes more than anything. to anyone else it might be cliché but _you_ , you are an idiot princess, and it melts your stupid heart. (you are an idiot princess who exploded from your castle in a cloud of dust and loneliness) and god knows, it doesn't take much.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much!! this is all i've written so far


	4. pearl spring

the flower, you kept - you pressed it and held it between the pages of your dictionary, like a secret. it was too tempting to find an apt page to put it on, a petal to underscore the definition of a sweet word, perhaps, but the thought of him flicking through the pages idly and finding it one day tortured you. more than that, it was hard to pick the right word. you sat at your desk and wasted at least twenty minutes early one morning, when you'd been unable to sleep, trying to work out the word for silas.

he'd know how to describe you. he'd say some beautiful nohrian word you'd never heard before and it would fit perfectly.

his bruise - the one below his left shoulder - has gone.

this morning, jakob finds you laid on the floor of your room staring at a moth, which is distressed at having managed to lose the sky, a wing broken perhaps. he reminds you that there is a war council meeting to attend. you stay laid there in a childish protest, silently begging him to tell you're awful, lazy, stupid, naive, waiting for him to get annoyed, trying to provoke anything but _devotion_ out of him. you hate him for never hating you. and yet you feel awful when he helps lift you from the ground, one arm under your legs and one pulling you up (and even worse when your body sways and considers collapsing, and he is there to steady you).

you're running out of ways to explain your useless state - tired, worried, sad, stressed, weak, sleep-deprived. they all stop meaning things when you use them too often, when they become interchangeable. all you know is it's not apathy.

jakob's mouth is set in a thin line. this is the most he will ever say.

you are a bad leader. like a dying monarch, or a doll, something barely able to occupy its seat, barely able to string together words or give instructions. you are something to prop at the head of a table for formalities, for symbolism, close to death or never really alive but it doesn't matter because all anyone needs is a selfless figurehead, something to worship, sanctify.

today you take your martyr's seat, and somewhere in your head you worry that they will notice your unbrushed hair and your rumpled clothing (though half the attendees look the same). there will be a day when you no longer sit in this chair. you do not want them to remember you as you are now.

to your left silas sports a bedhead. hinoka yawns behind her hand occasionally.

orochi, on your right, squeezes your hand and you smile at her, hoping that your drained feeling is starting to subside now you are out of your room.

ryoma is late - when he arrives, his forehead is creased with worry, and he looks around the table once before telling everyone to take the morning off. takumi's mouth opens like he might challenge him, but then he closes it again. war takes its toll.

so silas takes you by the hand and leads you to the pearl spring, his eyes all unreadable and afflicted. most everyone else is going on a hunting trip - you briefly see takumi again, feeding arrows into his quiver with his gloved hand - and silas would probably prefer to go too, but you are too tiredworriedsadstressedweaksleepdeprived to argue.

you walk into the water still in your clothes, and sit down, hunching up so the lukewarm water runs right up to your neck and sends a shiver up your body.

silas smiles at you curiously for a moment, hands on the hem of his shirt, before he shrugs and jumps in after you. the water splashes your face and suddenly you're laughing.

when he surfaces you cup your hands and send a small wave over to him. it hits him square in the chest and you ignore the memory that a week ago, an axe hit him in the same place. he laughs too and moves over to you through the water; you swim away, not that there is much space to swim to in the tiny spring. your toes brush the bottom in most places, a smooth feeling of clams under your feet.

you are thinking of words. you are thinking caesious (blueish-grey), you are thinking scintilla (tiny trace or spark of a specified quality or feeling), you are thinking indelible (making marks that cannot be removed). mostly, you are thinking inexorable (impossible to stop or prevent; impossible to persuade; unrelenting), but none of these words are the correct blend of nohrian and hoshidan that you require. your tongue feels alien to you most of the time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this one is so short and that it's been so long!


	5. grass stains

"good morning," he says, only voice to ever make a nohrian accent sound soft.

you don't ask him why he's up at this time. it's a stupid question. you make a lame joke: "is it? i hadn't noticed."

it's not morning at all, or at least, not any time of morning that could be cared to be identified. it's not dark, but not light. second nature, you feel his hand graze your wrist and then he's leading you away, out of the gates, up a hill. you look out over the horizon, try to ignore the signs of conflict below that he evidently wishes were less visible, and concentrate on the sky. it's the sort of grey that gives no indication of time.

he lies back in the damp grass, uncaring, and stares up at it, arms rigid by his sides as if beginning to rust, too-soft grass between his slightly purpling, scabbing knuckles, the army's ( _your_ army's) unofficial uniform. by his thumb is a buttercup—you think that's what they're called.

his eyes flutter closed.

the air is dew and a breeze too calm and regular; as you watch it brushes the same strands of his hair repeatedly. he almost looks at peace, melding into the landscape. the plants would learn to grow around him, you think, over shins and shoulders, climbing up sides, and with his imprint underneath him, meshed into the grass, he makes it look easy to create history in a place that has too much. he makes it look easy to leave a mark in a world that would sooner mark him. the world is possessive that way (or perhaps it's just battlefields. your hope is that one day you will get to learn the difference. it's a selfish one).

you lie in the grass next to him, suddenly sick with the knowledge that you are both overgrown children with power beyond your hands, his bloodied twice a week, and yours twice as often. you want to say: _i wonder, like everyone seems to, if everything we've ever done is worth anything._ say: _if i don't believe in right and wrong, can i still believe in just and evil?_  say: _but i want you to tell me i'm good. 'cause all i can think of is 'what if?'_

 _maybe everything we've ever done is wrong._  

instead, he speaks. he asks me: "do you miss it?"

_it?_

the underside of your fingernails is permanently the warm, browning red of dried blood or dirt. it makes you wish for warm water and clean white basins somewhere far away, in a palace, so you can't look down at your hand as he squeezes it.

he watches as you open your mouth and try to answer. his nohrian skin looks washed out in this light, ash, even the bloodshot lines of his eyes overcast. you want to rest your head on his chest, live in an unchanging second, unaware of time or fear or anything. it would be nice for things to just stop for a while. to watch the same five clouds roll over you, utterly unable to react to it, unable to try force change on something that doesn't seem susceptible to it, something so much bigger than you.

you think of everything, images flashing through your brain a mile a minute, neatly organised into the ones that make your throat close up the quickest. "to tell you the truth—i'm sick of it. the memories. i don't want any of them."

he turns his head to look at you, now, surprised. his face says: _i am the opposite_. says: shocked, _hurt_ , even. he ran here, found you, based on very old memories. you always forget.

"i can't change what i decided and i can't stop feeling how i feel."

there is silence for a moment. you hear insects humming; the sun is finally starting to rise.

"me neither," he replies.

he never grew out of his slightly unruly hair, and you're almost angry at how it is still more likeable than ugly when he tells you how much he loves sitting up here. you say it's beautiful and you're talking about the view, but you think if you spent enough time with him, his hair could start to remind you of being thirteen again. do you want it to? you can't tell anymore. treading beyond anything but the last ten seconds feels like walking on thorns, painful and difficult, a very particular type of self-inflicted misery.

you look across at him, and his elbows covered in grass stains. it makes you so nostalgic. before you went to war—before the world changed—before you knew anything—this was all you ever wanted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello, i hope this chapter is okay. thank you for the patience! life is running away with me


	6. fresh peaches

silas is a boy with a lot of questions. _what do you like to eat? where's your favourite place to go walking? what makes you feel content?_ _what's your favourite colour flower season animal word song feeling?_

_tell me about the nicest thing you've ever seen._

you think there might be things he's avoiding that he desperately wants to know about. he doesn't ask for your favourite memories, exactly, but if he asks about your favourite scent, when you answer 'fresh peaches', he can ask why. he's smart.

he approaches you very delicately so as to only ask for answers you can stand to give. there is even the opportunity to entirely reconstruct yourself, if you wanted.

recently, though, peaches haven't been sweet enough. recently, you've found yourself alone in your room after the celebrations and the cheering and after jakob has helped remove your armor and taken your boots to clean away the rusty-smelling dirt of the battlefield, after you've come back into yourself, stopped moving and speaking without thinking first, acting automatically.

once you are back in your own head to consider everything and your thoughts can run a-mile-a-minute again, everything speeds back up. it happens fast, covered in drool: a punch to the face. then things happen in detail, colour, in ways you can experience vividly—the rapid, jittering shake of your hands and breath, the rasping sound of it as you pull back together, the feeling of your tongue against your teeth, the tang of blood on a bitten and split lip. this is infinitely better than watching from some place far back in your head, where things happen slowly with a dampening on your senses like a cloth in your mouth. now when you can feel you often want it to be strong, not sweet. (your brain chimes in: _silas is an exception,_  and you tell it to shut up. idiot princess.)

something acerbic to make your breath hitch. lemons to make you wince, to squeeze into cuts, sharp and grounding, to keep you in your own head with thoughts and feelings and senses to be overwhelmed, not a passive observer of your own actions. lemons to sink your teeth into. there is a restless energy in your forearms and your wrists, your ankles, your larynx. it engulfs all of your thoughts when it is happening. a constant buzzing. you can never tell if you want to train so hard you pass out or tear out stumbling through a field or ride one of the horses faster and faster til you can feel the adrenaline humming behind your ears, air cutting your throat, or if you should try to hold onto the rush. so long as you can keep thinking and moving and feeling. it would be nice to be able to scream.

war makes everything numb or painful, polarises good and bad, everything a juxtaposition of feeling lost in the middle of a busy food hall and found when biting your knuckles against the wall of the deserted bathhouse (pain to concentrate on). the constant stimulation of fear and adrenaline on the battlefield renders you impervious for short times and then at others unconfined, crying out for something to happen, some nails dug in, fingers wrapped round, the feeling of a heart in your throat.

if you are going to eat peaches you want them to be so sweet they make you retch. palms against cold floor.

the next time you are in a between-state, you try to explain it. you put it to him like this, as he looks at you through bamboo shoots in the garden, circling each other as you talk (as if dancing, but not close enough): “imagine you have been told nothing and all your life has been spent a tiny room with your eyes closed in the dark. and then one day the sun appears in front of you.”

he snorts, brows furrowing. “what?”

“suddenly i could feel white behind my eyes.”

he is silent for a moment, mulling the image over. you realise at once that everything you feel is incredibly specific to you and then you are suddenly very small. you pray he will find some nohrian aphorism for you. some pithy piece of wisdom, the sound and sane advice silas always has. something nostalgic.

“what did it feel like?” he says instead, softly, countering with another question, a new one, more direct. _what's your favourite colour flower season animal word song feeling?_

_tell me about the nicest thing you've ever seen._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you again for reading! i feel like this chapter was a bit messy/extra so apologies


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